In this “Whiskey Optional” episode, PTJ facilitates a conversation among four colleagues from dif…
Episode 23: Being Academic and Pandemic Time
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Academia
Bridging the Gap in National Security Studies
This is a guest post from Paul Johnson, who is an operations research analyst with the US Army. His personal research ranges on topics from political violence and militias to security force loyalty...
Doing PhD Research While Staying in Place
Last night, I taught another session of our Dissertation Proposal Workshop class, and the topic was the methodology section of one's proposal. That is, how am I going to research this question...
Public Health Research in Mainstream International Relations Outlets
Steve Saideman’s recent Duck piece on international relations scholars’ relative silence on issues of pandemics, and public health more generally, has ruffled feathers[1]and generated a lot of...
More Academia Posts
What’s an expert?
Yesterday’s post Confidence and Gender in International Relations got me thinking. The post draws on the excellent survey data from the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) project at William and Mary’s Institute for the Theory & Practice of International Relations and notes that in the snap polls conducted by the project over the last year, women international relations scholars choose the response “I don’t know” more often than their male counterparts. They conclude that structural factors such as socialization might explain this “confidence gap” between female and male...
Confidence and Gender in International Relations
The following is a guest post by Rachel Merriman-Goldring, Susan Nelson, Hannah S. Petrie at William and Mary's Institute for the Theory & Practice of International Relations. For decades, survey research has suggested that women lack confidence in their answers, responding ‘don’t know’ or ‘maybe’ at significantly higher rates than their male counterparts. Initially, this trend on political surveys was attributed to topic-specific political knowledge gaps between men and women. However, recent research, including a study on the confidence gap between male and female economists,...
Viva La In-Text Tables and Figures Revolution!
I try to save paper these days by reviewing manuscripts via PDFs on my computer or my tablet. It also makes it easier to read stuff while traveling--both to read on a plane and to carry less paper around. The biggest challenge in doing this is the habit/standard of people putting their tables/figures at the back of the document and having endnotes and not footnotes. I know most of the blame for this goes to journals which require such formatting, although that is changing (thanks Dan at ISQ). To be clear, the requirement is for submission of the final draft for many journals and not for...
7 Further Thoughts on Being A Better Job Market Candidate
Amanda in her inimitable style has written some very persuasive guidance about the job market. Let me add a few thoughts about what else you can do to prepare. If you've already been socialized to want an academic job, then you better be ready for a rough slog. Unless you happen to be among the handful of students who get all the attention and plum interviews this job market season, you are likely to get a couple of interviews and at worst none at all. As Amanda said, most of this is out of your control. The job market sucks. There are thousands of people chasing too few jobs. Imagine you...
Gearing Yourself Up For the Academic Job Market: Waiting
It’s getting to be that time of year again – the time when a fresh not-so-fresh crop of ABDs/PhDs gear-up for the academic job market. I’ve been there – it can make even the most self-assured academic have an existential crisis.[1] As much as I hated being on the job market myself, I absolutely love looking up and providing job market advice for students at Mizzou. I think I received especially good advice when I was a grad student and I think the advice I received has been causally related to my present situation (which I love). I’d like to “pay it forward.” On my first day as DGS, I...
Sexism in Political Science, part II: The Very Least One Can Do
Last night, I posted this about sexism in political science. It has gotten a pretty strong response getting 10x as many hits (so far) as my usual post, lots of retweets by female political scientists, and some sharing on facebook. The sharing on facebook came with props as my female political science friends were happy to see a senior male political scientist talk bluntly about this. These props/kudos made me feel squishy because it is not that hard to blog and notice on occasion that there is sexism in the poli sci business (as it is everywhere as one FB friend noted). My female...
An American in Canada – Thoughts on Going Abroad for a Job
I never thought that when I started grad school I’d be relocating to another country. Then again, when I got the job in Canada, it did not really occur to me that I was “really” leaving the US – on my previous visits to Toronto, everything felt pretty familiar. Plus, as a scholar of transnational activism, borders were supposed to be made increasingly irrelevant. I still remember the moment the border agent stamped my passport and glued the work permit into its folds. I had actually crossed a border for my job – politically, socially, and culturally. While many things are the same,...
Organizing Collaborative Research Projects: Where Do I Begin?
The following is a guest post by Andrew Yeo at Catholic University of America. Collaborating with friends, colleagues, and other scholars is a great motivator for research. But if you’re at a small research university with limited institutional resources, the hurdles to do collaborative research beyond co-authoring is higher. Small departments, limited budgets, the absence of relevant research centers/programs, and few ongoing sponsored research activities ultimately makes it harder for junior scholars to learn how to organize larger collaborative research projects. If this sounds like your...